Last Man on Earth

by Bron Fane, Lionel Fanthorpe, Patricia Fanthorpe

Genres: Horror; Science Fiction

Synopsis

The strange thing about THE END was that nobody expected it...
The pessimists had been wrong. No atomic war. No nuclear destruction. No fall out. No radioactivity. Disarmament had brought universal peace and sanity. Co-existence had become a reality - not an idealist's dream.
Then disaster struck. The desperate weather forecasts were the beginning. The ice was The End.
Seas became frozen wastes. Rivers turned to glaciers overnight. The whole planet was in the grip of a cold so intense that millions perished in a few hours... millions more died within the week.
Only the bravest and the hardiest survived. Rugged men and courageous women, with the spirits of the earliest pioneers, urging them on to do the impossible.
Was the big freeze just a cosmic accident - with man on the unlucky end? Had one of the big powers tried to master weather control, secretly, despite the disarmament talks... and failed disastrously.
Perhaps it was the prelude to alien invasion?

Release date: April 28, 2016

Publisher: Orion Publishing Group

Print pages: 320

Sample

JIM DONOVAN was a tall, grey eyed, whispering giant, whose broad shoulders seemed somehow less aggressive, because of their scholarly stoop. He was a quiet, introspective astronomer, whose life revolved around two things—his family and his work.

He stood now in the laboratory, one hand resting lightly on the cold and unresponsive metal of the telescope. Tony Martell, his fresh-faced young assistant, looked up questioningly from the logarithm charts with which he was completing the calculation Jim had given him.

“What’s the matter, sir?”

Jim appeared not to hear him. He repeated the question. The grey eyes moved slowly in his direction.

“I don’t know, boy,” said Donovan. “I don’t think anything’s the matter—yet. But I’ve got a horrible feeling that something very well may be. I’d rather not talk about it at the moment. I want to think about it. You understand?”

“Yes, of course, sir.”

Martell knew these deep introspective moods of Donovan’s of old … given a bare skeleton of fact, Donovan’s brilliant mind could work upon it until he had an unanswerable hypothesis. A towering skyscraper of thought, reaching out into the infinity of the void. He was another Einstein, a mathematician par excellence. A man whose mind seemed to be as big as the universe which he studied. There was a strange at-one-ment between Jim Donovan in his best moods and the great world of galaxies, constellations and deep space. It was as though the telescope was some kind of bridge into the infinite. Just as Wordsworth had discovered spiritual peace amidst the beauties of Cumberland’s lakes, so the astronomer found his contact with destiny and with the great eternal world, through contemplation of it. And just as men will spend their lives with plants and animals, men who commune with nature in its more familiar patterns seem to find some weird intuitive ability to communicate with nature. So Donovan was in rapport with the infinite, through his lifelong association with space, with the stars, the planets, the galaxies. It was as though he was their younger brother. As though he shared with them something of the eternal mystery that lay just beyond the thin atmospheric envelope of the earth. Although his feet never left his planet Jim Donovan was a space man in the fullest, deepest sense of the word.

Just as the Game Warden or the keeper of the Birds Sanctuary was aware when something was amiss with his animals or his birds, so Donovan knew when all was not well in the vast infinitudes of space.

Martell continued working at his tables. There was a small computer attached to the laboratory, and he decided that if nothing else was being fed through at the moment, it would save a great deal of time if he taped his queries to the mechanical brain, rather than wear out his own!

Donovan moved back to the telescope, his keen grey eyes absorbing the magnified light as he allowed his consciousness to go winging out there into space. He adjusted the hair control of the ’scope, and found, as he had suspected, that slight focal adjustment had produced an increase of clarity—a marked increase of clarity. It confirmed his original hypotheses, far more strikingly than the sheets of paper on which his young assistant was now working. Dimly, through the thoughts that surged around in his mind, he could hear the computer clicking merrily in the next room, and he knew it would only be a matter of moments before his young assistant came up with an answer.

He moved back from the telescope again and took a pace around the observatory. He hoped he was wrong. He wanted to be wrong. He would gladly have sacrificed his career and everything he was—he would gladly have sacrificed his life’s work to be wrong! How wrong could an expert be? he asked himself. Surely he wasn’t infallible. There were greater astronomers. There were higher authorities he could consult. There were larger, more elaborate pieces of equipment, and more expensive observatories. Perhaps there was a fault somewhere in the mechanism. Perhaps his computer—perhaps his own mental calculation was at fault—anyway it was very early yet. No need to spread alarm and despondency. Tony Martell came back. He looked strangely white. His normally bright, fresh complexion seemed blanched. He looked older, years older. His youthful eyes no longer shone with their accustomed vigour and vitality.

“I don’t like the answer, sir!”

“I didn’t think you would! Now you know what’s been worrying me!”

“Do you mean to say you’d already roughly calculated that in your mind, sir?” Donovan nodded.

“Roughly!” he agreed.

“It’s going to come devilishly close,” said Tony Martell. “Devilishly close” he repeated.

“It should sweep the area of space through which the solar system is at present passing” said Donovan.

“How has it happened?” asked the boy.

“How does anything happen in the universe?” said the boy. “How does anything happen anywhere?”

“Things happen in accordance with some law of cause and effect” said Donovan. “That’s all I can tell you. That’s all I know! I’m an astronomer, my young friend, not a metaphysician” he remarked ruefully. “Not a metaphysician nor a magician. No enchanter, no Merlin, no Druid. I can’t tell you what’s at the back of the universe. I can only observe certain phenomena and draw conclusions from them. Assuming that those phenomena act in the way that we anticipate, I can draw conclusions, and predict and prognosticate on their future behaviour. Beyond that I can do nothing. I am as ignorant as the veriest peasant who doesn’t even know there is a new star in the sky.”

“Where do these things come from?” asked Martell.

“You’ve got a degree in astronomy—you tell me!” invited Donovan.

The youngster shrugged his shoulders. “I assume that we can work on the Galactic Creation theory? That they are born of the nova? That they are born of the nebulae? That they are born from hydrogen atoms which appear in space on a circular creation? Who knows?”

“Precisely!” agreed the professor, “who knows? And why should they choose to travel in the way that they do? Expanding universe—stable universe? Ah, there is so much that is completely beyond our ken! We are unable to observe enough of their emotions. You see, even with our most highly powered radio astronomy apparatus, we are like some short-sighted insect creeping about on a forest floor and trying to calculate the movements of the birds! We are like single-celled amoeba, mites, tick … things of infinite smallness creeping and crawling about in a world of such limited dimensions that we are not able to comprehend what goes on above us. Could an amoeba explain the water barrel in which it lives and moves and has its being? Could a speck of plankton write a treatise on oceanography?” He shook his head. “Can man, the smallest and feeblest of any intelligences that inhabit the universe—no doubt—can man explain the universe?” He clenched his fists until the nails bit into the palms of his hand. “‘A little lower than the angels God created man’—just a little lower?” He raised an eyebrow quizzically.

Tony Martell had no answer for the rhetorical question.

“—a great deal lower, I should say, else not even angels know the answer to the mysteries of the universe.”

“Perhaps they don’t,” said Martell quietly, “perhaps it is a secret locked alone in the infinite mind of God! … Be that as it may, sir, we are faced with a fact. The fact that is obviously not without precedent.”

“Yes, I was rather thinking of that” agreed Donovan. He stopped and peered through the eye-piece again. “A fact that is not without precedent.” He repeated, “Let us reconsider the basic theory of cosmology. You know, and I know, and every educated schoolboy knows that way back in dim primordial time another star passed close to our sun and pulled from it a tide of flaming gas—a gas which shrank, cooled and hardened, and broke up into the red hot planets. We stand now upon something which was once a mass of burning gas. Green field, soft brown earth, birds, buildings, men, ships, cars … even this telescope … everything was at one time or another in existence only as a blob of filmy incandescence. Perhaps, in the very way that we were born, so our solar system and all that goes with it shall end! For a star that approached us once and gave birth to the planets could very easily be their destruction! A star coming too close, and throwing our gravity hopelessly out of alignment could pull us away from the sun, could leave us cold, in the wild outermost darkness of space. Imagine a world with no light and no heat! A world of ice and death. Ugh! I think incineration would be preferable to that! There is something so terrifying about the thought of eternal cold …”

“I don’t know,” said Martell, “an accident which drew us away from the sun into the cold wilderness of outer space, might one day be reversed, and the cold planet brought back into the warmth of a star again. An incinerated planet couldn’t.”

“Yes, there’s something in what you say,” agreed Donovan, “but let us not go to the absolute extreme of our morbid prognostication. Let us assume a middle course. A catastrophe which might be survived, with some foresight.”

“Thinking about the ice cold world,” said Martell, “I remember reading a poem once by Robert Service, it was called the ‘Cremation of Sam MacGee’ It was semi-humorous, semi-macabre. Apparently two friends were ‘mushing’ their way over the Dawson Trail in the old days of the Yukon, and Sam MacGee knew that he was dying of the infernal cold. He turned to his friend and said:

“It’s not being dead, it’s the awful dread of an icy grave that pains, I want you to swear that foul or fair you’ll cremate my last remains.”

“He appeared to prefer incineration,” smiled Jim Donovan laconically, “a point of view with which you did not agree!”

“I still don’t,” said Martell, “but I can understand his view—the thought of lying eternally beneath vast oceans of ice!”

“Which would undoubtedly be our lot if we were drawn away from the light and warmth of the sun,” returned the professor.

“Not only would the water freeze, but the air would freeze. We should be trapped beneath layers of liquid air. We should be flooded—drowned in liquid air, we should be frozen solid in it! Finally that liquid air would turn into solid air. Absolute zero! Hundreds of degrees below … Nothing could move, nothing could breathe, nothing could stir, life’s processes would stop, everything would stop! It would be a frozen world. A world so dead that there would be no hope of resurrection.”

“What were you saying about a middle course, and taking precautions?” said Martell.

“These calculations are by no means complete.” returned Donovan, “we don’t know how close the thing is coming, we haven’t had time to work out the exact position which the earth itself will occupy when this enormous thing draws close. But there’s one thing we can be certain of—if it comes within a hundred million miles of the solar system, it is a body of such colossal mass that it will produce fantastic tides. Flooding, if nothing else, will threaten nine-tenths of the land mass of the earth. The only safety would be upon the highest, and strongest, and most durable mountain peaks.”

“The Himalayas?” queried Martell.

“Precisely! The Himalayas.”

“Could humanity cluster on the Himalayas?” wondered his assistant.

“Some of it might. Most of it wouldn’t even want to go if it had the chance! Look at the people who live on the slopes of volcanoes. When the volcano erupts they are killed in their hundreds. They suffer bereavement and loss of life, limb and property and yet, for some unaccountable reason, as soon as the volcano has died down once more into quiescence—they return. Man is a strange, stubborn. . .